Distinguished Guest Lecture Series

The Humanities Institute's Distinguished Guest Lecture Series has been designed both to attract world-class academic speakers to Ireland and to raise the profile of the Institute's mission and programme. Since 2005, a number of international experts have been incited to reflect on the contribution of the humanities and social sciences to the establishment of a knowledge society underpinned by sustainable economic, social and cultural growth. Below, you can read details of all speakers and their lectures to date. All biographical details are correct at the time the lecture took place.

All seminars take place in room H204, the HI seminar, room which is located on the second floor of the UCD Humanities Institute.

Lecture 31

Professor Ángela Cenarro, Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain

Title: Women, Gender and Violence in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939)

Date: Wednesday 25 March 2015

Time: 4 p.m.

Venue: H204, UCD Humanities Institute Seminar Room

Women’s experience during the Spanish Civil War was not only determined by the projects imposed by the Republican and the Francoist governments, but also by the violence unleashed by both rearguards after the failed coup d’etat in July 1936. Since they were the cornerstones of social and political reconstruction behind the frontline, as well as having their lives preconditioned by specific and opposed gender discourses, women were submitted in several ways to violence and control, despite the fact that violent processes were clearly asymmetric in their conception, procedures and consequences. On the Francoist side, women experienced rituals of humiliation strictly related to the control of their bodies and their reproductive condition, such as sexual violence, the shaving of their heads and the forced ingestion of castor oil. Despite the fact that this was not the case on the Republican side, women’s experiences and identities were determined by a left-wing gender discourse that created different ways of patriarchal submission. Because conservative women were supposed to be subjected to the Catholic Church, left-wing committees and militiamen, engaged in a revolutionary project since the summer of 1936, aimed to “liberate” them as a key element of the “purification” process that was considered an essential prerequisite for the construction of the emerging new order. Please click here for a copy of the poster.

Lecture 30

Title: The Future of the Academic and Public Humanities: The Changing Academic Environment in the U.S.

Date: Friday 28 November 2014

Time: 10 a.m. - 12.30 p.m.

Venue: H204, UCD Humanities Institute Seminar Room

In the United States, the pressures on the academic humanities grow daily. Legislators demand utilitarian curricula; university administrators invest funds and faculty in the STEM disciplines; and students’ debt drives them to vocational courses. While defending the value of the arts, history, languages, literature, philosophy, and other traditional humanities disciplines, many North American academics are also beginning to experiment with imaginative collaborations—reaching out to other disciplines and inter-disciplines such as the health humanities, to public humanities organizations, to public policy makers, and to an often overlooked audience of non-academic readers and thinkers. Humanities centers can play a critical role in fostering interdisciplinary research and teaching, creative uses of technology, inter-institutional collaboration, and publicly engaged humanities scholarship and teaching. How can scholars who are accustomed to working alone and autonomously on individual projects adapt to collaborative projects and publicly engaged arts and community-based scholarship? One answer is to identify the disciplinary values we want to hold onto and to integrate those values when collaborative scholarship holds promise. The University of Iowa’s Obermann Center for Advanced Studies offers one case study. Like many humanities centers, the Obermann Center strives to balance a commitment to support faculty and graduate arts, research, and scholarship with the demands and opportunities for higher education in a public university in the 21st century.

Lecture 29

Professor Guoqi Xu, Professor of History, Hong Kong University, China

Title: Asia and the First World War

Date: Friday 23 November 2012

Time: 4.00 p.m.

Venue: H204, UCD Humanities Institute Seminar Room

Guoqi Xu is currently Professor of History at the University of Hong Kong, China. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and is one of the world’s most prominent scholars in the fields of modern China and international history. Professor Xu was a fellow at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2008-09 and taught from 1999-2009 at Kalamazoo College (USA) as the Wen Chao Chen Chair of History and East Asian Affairs. He is currently a visiting fellow of the Humanities Institute and the Centre for War Studies at UCD

Lecture 28

Title: Music and Religion: Anthropological and Historical Considerations

Date: Tuesday 10 April 2012

Time: 5.00 p.m.

Venue: H204, UCD Humanities Institute Seminar Room

Lorenz Welker holds doctoral degrees in musicology and medicine, and practises as a psychotherapist in addition to his teaching and research as a musicologist. Professor Welker is renowned as a scholar of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century music in Europe and has published widely on Italian, French and German instrumental and vocal music of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance. His publications include monumental facsimile editions of late medieval music (notably the St Emmeram Codex in 2006 with Ian Rumbold, Peter Wright and Martin Staehlin) and monographs, repertory studies and essays in the cultural history and reception of late medieval music in Europe. Professor Welker is a recipient of the Dent Medal for musicology from the Royal Musical Association and director of Munich University’s department of studies for senior citizens. Much of his recent research explores the relationship between music and the cognitive sciences.

Lecture 27

Professor Heinz Schilling (Humboldt University, Berlin)

Title: Religion and migration in early modern Europe – the Calvinist and the Sephardic experience

Date: Tuesday, 7 June 2011

Time: 4.30pm

Venue: H204, UCD Humanities Institute Seminar Room

Chair: Dr Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin (UCD School of History & Archives)

Professor Heinz Schilling can rightly be considered the doyen of Early Modern Historians now living. Born in Bergneustadt, he studied at the University of Cologne and took his doctorate at the University of Freiburg. After a period in the faculty of the University of Bielefeld, he held chairs at the Universities of Osnabrück and then later at Giessen. In 1992 he was appointed as first professor of Early Modern European History in the Institute of Historical Studies (Institut für Geschichtswissenschaften) at Humboldt University, Berlin. Among a very wide array of prestigious ancillary positions, Professor Schilling has served as chair of the Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte, the German branch of the Society for Reformation Research, and is a corresponding member of the British Academy and a member of Academia Europaea. Professor Schilling is the founding father of the theory of religious confessionalization, which has become one of the conceptual building blocks for historians working in the field of Early Modern History. He is the author of a plethora of extraordinarily influential publications, including over twenty books beginning with his Niederländische Exulanten im 16. Jahrhundert in 1972, and including the seminal works on confessionalization such as Konfessionskonflikt und Staatsbildung (1981) and Konfessionalisierung und Staatsinteressen (2007). To many of us he is most familiar through the English language versions of his ideas such as his Religion, Political Culture and the Emergence of Early Modern Society published by Brill in 1992, the 1991 volume of essays Civic Calvinism in Northwestern Germany and the Netherlands, also published by Brill, and the 2008 volume from the 2006 Menahem Stern Jerusalem Lectures, Early modern European Civilisation and its political and cultural dynamics.

Lecture 26

Dr Ian Ker (University of Oxford)

Title: Newman's idea of a university: some misunderstandings

Date: Tuesday, 17 May 2011

Time: 5.00 p.m.

Venue: H204, UCD Humanities Institute Seminar Room

Ian Ker has taught both English literature and theology in universities in both the United States and Britain, where he is now Senior Research Fellow at St Benet's Hall, Oxford where he teaches in the theology faculty. He is the author and editor of more than 20 books on Newman, including the Oxford critical edition of The Idea of a University and the standard biography, which has recently been reissued in both hardback and paperback by Oxford University Press. He is also the author of The Catholic Revival in English Literature 1845-1961 and Mere Catholicism. His intellectual and literary life of G. K. Chesterton was published by Oxford University Press in April.

Lecture 25

Jeffers Engelhardt (Department of Music, Amherst College)

Title: The Secular Enchantments of Ethnomusicology

Date: Thursday, 14 April 2011

Time: 5.00 p.m.

Venue: H204, UCD Humanities Institute Seminar Room

This talk examines the relationship of secular epistemologies and forms of modern religious practice in the cultural study of music. Drawing on fieldwork with Orthodox Christians and Pentecostals in Estonia and Kenya, Engelhardt explores ways in which secularity and the enchantments of worship and piety are deeply interdependent. Ultimately, Engelhardt suggests how the disciplinary and epistemological limits of ethnomusicology might contribute to the critical rethinking of secular critique and the project of secularism.

This event is a joint initiative of the UCD Humanities Institute and the UCD School of Music.

Lecture 24

Robert L. Hohlfelder is Professor of History at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has published many articles and chapters on ancient seafaring and maritime archaeology and is the author of King Herod’s Dream: Caesarea on the Sea (with Kenneth Holum, Norton 1988) He has edited several volumes including The Maritime World of Ancient Rome (University of Michigan Press 2008). He has participated in numerous archaeological excavations, both terrestrial and maritime, including, as Senior Marine Archaeologist, the Persian War Shipwreck Survey, 2003-6 and DANAOS – Deepwater Archaeological Survey off Southern Crete, 2007-8. He has received research grants and awards from the National Geographic Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society and the University of Colorado.

Lecture 23

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Professor Steven Mithen, Pro-Vice Chancellor, University of Reading

Title: Communal and monumental architecture at the origin of the Neolithic in the Near East: new evidence from Wadi Faynan, Southern Jordan

Date: Monday, 7 February 2011

Time: 5 p.m.

Steven Mithen has a BA (hons) in Prehistory & Archaeology from Sheffield University, an MSc in Biological Computation from York University and a PhD in Archaeology from Cambridge University. Between 1987 and 1992 he was a Research Fellow at Trinity Hall and then Lecturer in Archaeology at Cambridge. After moving to the University of Reading, he was promoted to Senior Lecturer (1996), Reader (1998) and then Professor of Early Prehistory (2000). In August 2002 he was appointed as the first Head of the School of Human & Environmental Sciences, formed by the Departments of Archaeology, Geography, Soil Science and the Postgraduate Institute of Sedimentology, a post he held until August 2008 when be became Dean of the Faculty of Science. He was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 2004.

Lecture 22

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Professor Conor Gearty, Professor of Human Rights Law, London School of Economics and Political Science

Title: Human Rights: seductive, dangerous, and necessary

Date: Friday, 21 January 2011

Time: 5 p.m.

Conor Gearty’s academic research focuses primarily on civil liberties, terrorism and human rights. His first book (co-authored with his colleague at both Cambridge and King's, Keith Ewing) was ‘Freedom under Thatcher’ and as its subtitle made clear it dealt with the state of civil liberties in modern Britain. He then wrote a book on terrorism, simply entitled ‘Terror’ which was published by Faber and Faber in 1991. Since then he has kept up his interest in both these subjects, writing more books on each - most recently ‘Civil Liberties’ (published by Oxford University Press in August 2007). In recent years he has also deepened his interest in human rights law and, more generally, in human rights - writing a book in 2004 called ‘Principles of Human Rights Adjudication’ and a more inter-disciplinary and shorter book in 2006, ‘Can Human Rights Survive?’ This last book was based on his 2005 Hamlyn lectures. His very latest book is a selection of essays on human rights and terrorism, published by Cameron May in April 2008. His next book is out later this year (2010) and is a co-authored work with Virginia Mantouvalou: ‘Debating Social Rights’.

Lecture 21

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Professor Iain Fenlon, Faculty of Music, King's College, Cambridge

Title: Life and Death: Public Music and Ritual in Renaissance Venice

Date: Thursday, 25 November 2010

Time: 5 p.m.

Iain Fenlon is Professor of Historical Musicology in the Faculty of Music, and a Fellow of King’s College.

He studied at Reading (BA 1970), Birmingham (MA 1971) and Cambridge (PhD 1977). In 1973-4 he was an advisory editor for Grove 6, then Hayward Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham (1974-5), a fellow of Villa I Tatti, (Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies) Florence (1975-6), and Junior and subsequently Senior research fellow at King’s College, Cambridge (1976-83). From 1979 he was Lecturer at Cambridge, and in 1996 was appointed Reader. He has held visiting appointments at Wellesley College, Massachusetts (1978-9), Harvard University (1984-5), the British School in Rome (1985), the Centre de Musique Ancienne, Geneva (1988-9), the École Normale Superiéure, Paris (1998-9), and the University of Bologna (2000-2001). In 1984 he was awarded the Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association, and was elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1989. He has also held Visiting Fellowships at All Souls College, Oxford (1991-2), and New College, Oxford (1992), and is Honorary Keeper of the Music at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Fenlon is the founding editor of Early Music History (1981-).

His principal area of research is music from 1450 to 1650, particularly in Italy. An early monograph on music on 16th-century Mantua explores how the Gonzaga family patronised the reform of liturgical music and the secular arts of spectacle. With James Haar he has written a study of the emergence of the Italian madrigal, which establishes the importance of its Florentine origins, and his 1994 Panizzi lectures on early Italian music print culture are published by The British Library. Giaches de Wert: Letters and Documents (Paris, 1999) provides editions with commentary of the composer’s letters, including an important cache of autographs discovered in the late 1990s. Most of his writings, some of which are gathered together in Music and Culture in Late Renaissance Italy (Oxford, 2000), explore how the history of music is related to the history of society. His most recent book is The Ceremonial City: History, Memory and Myth in Renaissance Venice (Yale, 2007).

Lecture 20

This lecture is a joint HII / Folklore event as part of the 75th Anniversary of the Irish Folklore Commission

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Dr Fredrik Skott, Research Archivist, Institute for Language and Folklore, University of Gothenburg

Title: Folklore and Nationalism: Folklore Collecting in Sweden during the interwar period

Date: Wednesday, 6 October 2010

Time: 5 p.m.

Fredrik Skott, PhD, Research archivist at the Institute for Language and Folklore, Department of Dialectology, Onomastics and Folklore Research in Gothenburg, and teacher at University of Gothenburg, Department of Historical Studies. In my thesis, Folkets minnen: Traditionsinsamling i idé och praktik 1919 - 1964 ["The Popular Memory: Folklore Collecting in Theory and Practice, 1919-1964"], I discussed the popular images that the Swedish folklore collections communicate and the ideas behind the selection principles governing their construction. Other research fields that I am interested in are witchcraft trials and mumming traditions.

David Hiley was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford and King’s College, London where he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the liturgical music of Norman Sicily. He was Music Master at Eton College and Lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London before becoming professor of Musicology at Regensburg in 1986. He has served as secretary and vice-president of the Plainsong & Medieval Music society and editor of its journal; chair of the IMS study group Cantus Planus; co-editor of Monumenta Monodica Medii Aevi and was a contributor and editor for the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and the New Oxford History of Music. He was elected to the Academia Europaea in 1998 and elected a corresponding member of the American Musicological Society in 2002. He has published numerous articles on all aspects of medieval plainchant, editions of saints’ offices and facsimile editions of medieval music manuscripts. He is probably best known for his 1993 publication Western Plainchant: A Handbook which has become the standard reference work on the subject. His most recent publication is the Cambridge Introduction to Gregorian Chant (2009). In recent years his work has focused on saints’ offices but he has also returned to re-examine the Norman chant traditions.

Toby Barnard is currently on a Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship, until 2009. When not on leave, he teaches an extensive range of options on the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, and supervises graduate students working on Ireland and Britain over that period.

His main research and writing currently focus on his Leverhulme project: ‘The cultures of print in Ireland between 1680 and 1800’. This looks likely to yield two book-length studies: the first provisionally titled ‘Authorship and Readership in eighteenth-century Ireland’, and the other, ‘The Cultures of Print in Ireland, c.1680-1800’. Dr Barnard is also co-editing one of the volumes in the new Cambridge edition of the collected works of Jonathan Swift, and plans to write on popular and unpopular art in England, c.1920-1950.

Professor Sharpe's interests are broadly the history of medieval England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. He has a special concern with first-hand work on the primary sources of medieval history, including palaeography, diplomatic and the editorial process, as well as the historical and legal contexts of medieval documents. He is general editor of the Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues and has published recently on medieval books and libraries before 1540 and on the Latin writers of Great Britain and Ireland. He is currently working on writs and writ-charters in eleventh- and twelfth-century England, preparing editions of the charters of William II and Henry I. Saints' lives and cults, especially those of the Celtic churches, have long been an interest.

Lauren Swayne Barthold joined the Department in 2005 as Assistant Professor of Philosophy. She received her Ph.D from the New School for Social Research in 2002, where she wrote her dissertation, under the supervision of Richard J. Bernstein, on Gadamer's conception of truth. She also holds an M.A. in Philosophy from Simon Fraser University (Burnaby, B.C.) and an M.C.S. from Regent College (Vancouver, B.C.). Previous teaching positions include Eugene Lang College, Haverford, and Siena. She has written and taught on Gadamer, Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor, Hannah Arendt, Harry Frankfurt, Jürgen Habermas, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Martin Heidegger. Other areas of research and teaching interests include philosophy and literature, feminism, ethics, American pragmatism, and hermeneutics. She is founder and current President of the North American Society for Philosophical Hermeneutics (NASPH Home Page).Her current areas of research include a monograph on the dialectical nature of Gadamer's hermeneutics, a critique of Rorty's refusal to allow religion a public role, and the role of the good in understanding.

Lecture 15

Title: Digitising Humanities and Social Sciences: Promises, Paradoxes and Problems

Date: Tuesday, 17th November 2009

Time: 5 p.m.

Sally Wyatt is Professor of 'digital cultures in development', Maastricht University, and senior research fellow with the Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences, KNAW. Her background is in economics (BA McGill, 1976; MA Sussex, 1979) and science and technology studies (PhD Maastricht, 1998). She has more than 25 years experience in teaching and research about technology policy and about the relationship between technological and social change, focusing particularly on issues of social exclusion and inequality. She has worked at the Universities of Sussex, Brighton, East London and Amsterdam as well as at the British Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). She co-ordinates PhD training in the Dutch Research School for Science, Technology and Modern Culture (WTMC) (with Els Rommes, Radboud University). She was President of EASST (European Association for the Study of Science and Technology) between 2001-4. Recently, she has worked on the internet and social exclusion and the ways in which people incorporate the internet into their practices for finding health information. Together with Andrew Webster, she is editor of a new book series, Health, Technology and Society (Palgrave Macmillan).This lecture has been organised in conjunction with the HII's Irish Virtual Research Library and Archive (IVRLA). For a copy of the poster for this event please click here.

Lecture 14

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Professor John Kerrigan

Professor of English, St John's College, Cambridge

Title: Shakespeare, Oaths and Vows

Date: Wednesday 30th September 2009

Time: 5p.m.

The language-world of early modern England was thick with oaths and vows, from casual profanity in taverns to the solemn undertakings of those marrying or accepting public office. Moralists urged the seriousness of oaths, casuists advised on how to undo them. There were religious and legal debates about what it meant to swear and how firmly one should keep a promise. The literature of the time reflects the prevalence of oaths and vows and the arguments about their status. But Shakespeare was exceptional in the density, depth and subtlety with which he explored these issues. His plays are full of oaths and vows doing structural, psychological and verbally minute, inventive work. Ranging across the output, but paying particular attention to Troilus and Cressida and The Winter's Tale, this lecture aims to rectify scholarly neglect of the topic, using historical, philosophical and stage-related arguments to highlight Shakespeare's awareness of the paradoxes of oath-taking and vowing and their potency in performance.

John Kerrigan is Professor of English 2000 at the University of Cambridge. Among his books are Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon (1996), On Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature (2001) and Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603-1707 (2008). He is currently completing a book on British and Irish poetry since the 1960s.

Lecture 13

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Professor Catriona Kelly

Professor of Russian, New College, University of Oxford

Title: St. Petersburg: Shadows of the Past

Date: Monday, 18th May 2009

Catriona Kelly was born and brought up in London, and studies Russian at Oxford and the University of Voronezh. After holding various research fellowships at Christ Church, Oxford, she taught for three years at the School of Salvonic and East European Studies, University of London, before taking up her current post in 1996.

She has published widely on Russian culture, especially of the Late Imperial and Soviet periods; her interests range from modernist poetry to the visual arts, women's writing and cultural history. Her books include Petrushka, the Russian Carnival Puppet Theatre (CUP, 1990); A History of Russian Women's Writing, 1820-1992 (OUP, 1994); An Anthology of Russian Women's Writing, 1777-1992 (OUP, 1994); Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture, and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin (OUP, 2001); Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2001); Comrade Pavlik: The Rise and Fall of a Societ Boy Hero (Franta, 2005); and Children's World: Growing Up in Russia 1890-1991 (Yale, 2007) (www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/russian/childhood).

Lecture 12

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Professor Guinn Batten

Associate Professor of English, Washington University in St. Louis. Fulbright Scholar 2008

Title: Feeling into Wordsworth: Romanticism, Nature and Violence in Heaney and Lacan

Date: Wednesday, 3 December 2008

Professor Batten is the author of The Orphaned Imagination: Melancholy and Commodity Culture in English Romanticism (1998), and she is a co-editor of Romantic Generations: Essays in Honor of Robert F. Gleckner (2001). Recently she has been involved in three Cambridge University Press projects associated with Irish Poetry. She is co-editor, with Dillon Johnston, of the section "Irish Poetry in English, 1945 to the Present" for the Cambridge History of Irish Literature and a contributor to The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry (published Sept. 2003) and The Cambridge Companion to the Poetry of Seamus Heaney (Fall 2008). With the support of a Fulbright award to Ireland in fall 2008, she is completing a book on states of emergency, the ethics of violence, and sexual difference in the poetry of English Romanticism and modern Ireland. She will also complete contributions for two Blackwell projects, a companion to the study of English Romantic poetry and a two-volume history of Irish literature. Formerly the manager and editor of Wake Forest University Press (the major publisher of Irish poetry in North America), she selected, edited, and wrote an Afterword for the North American edition of Medbh McGuckian’s, The Soldiers of Year II (2002).

Lecture 11

Werner Jeanrond gained his Masters Degree with distinction from the University of Saarbrücken in 1979, and a PhD with distinction from Chicago Divinity School in 1984. He was a lecturer, then senior lecturer, and eventually Head of School at Trinity College Dublin between 1981 and 1994. Most recently he has been working as Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Lund in Sweden.

Professor Jeanrond’s teaching interests include in all areas of systematic theology, such as christology , pneumatology, ecclesiology, soteriology, eschatology, political theology, feminist theology, theology of love, liberation theology, contextual theology and more. Prof Jeanrond also teaches hermeneutics, models of theology, correlational theologies; and philosophy of religion, ethics, theology and literature, and interreligious dialogue. His research interests include philosophical and theological hermeneutics; theological method; the concept of God; eccesiology; political theology; the theology of love. At present he is working on a monograph on the theology of love

Lecture 10

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Professor Renford Reese

Professor of Politics Science and Director of the Colourful Flags Programme, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

Title: Ignorance is bliss: the challenge of cultural competency and citizenry

Date: Monday, 5 May 2008

Renford Reese grew up in McDonough, Georgia. He received his Bachelors of Arts degree in political science from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee in 1989. He received his Master's degree in public policy from the Vanderbilt Institute for Public Policy Studies in 1990. In 1996, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California's School of Public Administration in Los Angeles. He did his doctoral dissertation research on intergroup relations and ethnic conflict at the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development in Geneva, Switzerland. Reese is currently a professor in the political science department and the founder/director of the acclaimed Colorful Flags program at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He is the author of four provocative books—the most recent being American Bravado (2008), which is a scathing critique of American hegemony and misuse of power. Reese has traveled to 46 countries and has given lectures in many of them.

Lecture 9

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Professor Julian Thomas

School of Arts, Histories and Cultures, University of Manchester

Title: Beyond material culture, material things and human existence

Date: Wednesday, 5 December 2007

Julian Thomas was educated at the Universities of Bradford (BTech in 1981) and Sheffield (MA1982, Ph.D. 1986). This doctoral research was concerned with social and economic change in the Neolithic of Wessex and the Upper Thames valley. He was a lecturer in archaeology at the University of Wales , Lampeter between 1987 and 1993, and taught at Southampton University from 1994 to 2000. He took up the Chair of Archaeology at Manchester in April 2000.

Julian's main research interests are concerned with the Neolithic period in Britain and north-west Europe, and with the theory and philosophy of archaeology. His major preoccupation throughout his career has been with finding ways of understanding prehistoric societies which confront the prejudices and assumptions of the contemporary west. Themes within this broader set of concerns include landscape and monumentality; the archaeology of death; the social role of material culture; the body, personhood and identity; the relationship between archaeology and anthropology; the history of archaeological thought; the contemporary political significance of archaeology; and the use of hermeneutic, phenomenological, feminist and post-structuralist philosophies in archaeology. He has recently published a study of the relationship between archaeology and modernity, which explores the connections between archaeological knowledge and the modern condition.

Lecture 8

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Professor Tomás Ó Cathasaigh

Henry L. Shattuck Professor of Irish Studies, Harvard University

Title: Aspects of memory and identity in Ireland

Date: Thursday, 2 9 November 2007

Tomás Ó Cathasaigh is the Henry L. Shattuck Professor of Irish Studies and Director of the Department of Celtic Languages and Literature at Harvard University. He is the author The Biography of Cormac mac Airt(1977) and of articles on early Irish literature, mythology and language.

Lecture 7

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Professor Sneja Gunew

Professor of English and Women's Studies, University of British Columbia

Title: Who counts as Europeans: from Orientalism to Occidentalism

Date: Wednesday, 9 May 2007

Sneja Gunew is currently Professor of English and Women's Studies and Director of the Centre for Research in Women's Studies and Gender Relations at the University of British Columbia. She has published widely on postcolonial, multicultural and feminist critical theory and has worked in the area of cultural policy, serving as a member of the Australia Council, a federal arts funding body. She has edited and co-edited four anthologies of Australian women's and multicultural writings. Her most recent book is Haunted Nations: the Colonial Dimensions of Multiculturalisms (Routledge 2004).

Lecture 6

Title: The "communitarianism" polemic, the "Jewish question", ethnic minorities and the crisis of French national identity

Date: Wednesday, 9 March 2007

Stephen Uran of the Centre d'Études Transdisciplinaires (Sociologie, Anthropologie, Histoire) of the CRNS in Paris is an expert in nineteenth and early twentieth century history.He has a special interest in the history of French colonialism.

Lecture 5

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Professor Philip Esler

Professor of Biblical Criticism, St. Mary's College, St. Andrew's University

Chief Executive, UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)

Title: The contribution of the arts and humanities to the production of public value

Date: Thursday, 2 November 2006

Philip Esler has a particular interest in the reading of biblical texts using the tools provided by social-scientific research. He also publishes and teaches in the areas of the Bible and the Visual Arts, and early Christian identity in Rome. He has extensive experience in managing complex change at a senior level of a university from his recent three years as the Vice-Principal for Research at St Andrews. Earlier in his career he worked for ten years as a litigation solicitor and then barrister. He was also a co-founder of a successful Christian monthly news-magazine in Australia.

For a period of four years from 1st September 2005 Professor Esler holds the position of Chief Executive of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and is taking leave from the University of St Andrews for that purpose.

Lecture 4

Directeur de Recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS, Paris, France) and Professor of Chinese Linguistics at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS)

Title: Language and genes in China

Date: Thursday, 26 October 2006

Alain Peyraube was born in November 1944 in Bordeaux where he received his schooling and his university degrees (BA in Linguistics, BA in Chinese, MA in Chinese Linguistics). From 1973 to 1975 he was a foreign student at the Beijing Language Institute and Beijing University (Department of Chinese). He completed his PhD dissertation "Les constructions locatives en chinois moderne" in 1976 and his Doctorat d'Etat "Syntaxe diachronique du chinois - Evolution des constructions datives du 14eme siecle avant J.-C au 18eme siecle" in 1984.

He is currently Directeur de Recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS, Paris, France) and Professor of Chinese Linguistics at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS).

He has been Director from 1984 to 1998 of the Institute of East Asian Linguistics (CNRS and EHESS), and is now Deputy Director of the "Division of Humanities and Social Sciences" of the CNRS since 1997.

Alain Peyraube has been Visiting Professor and Visiting Scholar at the Cornell University (Hu Shih Chair in 1995), at the University of California at Santa Barbara (1990-1991, and every year thereafter since 1996), at the Hong Kong Baptist University (from 1993 to 1995), at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (1986), at the Academia Sinica of Taiwan (1988), at La Trobe University in Australia (1994, 1999).

He was elected and served as President of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics from 1998 to 1999.

He is director of the Collection "China" at Flammarion Publishing House, co-director of the Collection "Monographs of the Cahiers de Linguistique - Asie Orientale", associate editor of the Journal of Chinese Linguistics, co-editor of the International Review of Chinese Linguistics, member of the editorial boards of the Cahiers de linguistique - Asie Orientale, of Etudes Chinoises, of Faits de langue, of Zhongguo yuwen.

Merlin Donald is a cognitive neuroscientist with a background in philosophy. He is the author of many scientific papers, and two influential books: Origins of the Modern Mind: Three stages in the evolution of culture and cognition (Harvard, 1991), and A Mind So Rare: The evolution of human consciousness (Norton, 2001). His PhD was obtained from McGill in 1968, and subsequently he spent two years at the School of Medicine, Yale University, as an NRC Post-Doctoral Fellow, followed by almost three years at the West Haven Veterans Administration Medical Center as a Research Neuropsychologist. He has been at Queen's University since 1972. He has also been a visiting professor at University College, London (three times), Harvard, Stanford, the University of California at San Diego, and elsewhere. He has also been a Visitor at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioural Sciences, at Stanford, California. He was awarded a Killam Research Fellowship from 1994 to 1996, and is a Fellow of the Canadian Psychological Association (1984), and the Royal Society of Canada (1995). Most of Dr. Donald's early empirical work was in the field of human cognitive and clinical neuroscience, with a specialization in electrophysiology. During the past 15 years he has returned to the topic that drew him to psychology in the first place: human intellectual and cognitive origins. This work bridges several disciplines in the sciences, social sciences and humanities. His central thesis is that human beings have evolved a completely novel cognitive strategy: brain-culture symbiosis.

Lecture 2

Founder of Reception Theory, recent publications on anthropology and literature: Born in 1926, Iser was Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Constance, West Germany. With his colleague Hans Robert Jauss, Iser is an exponent of 'reception-theory'. Iser privileges the experience of reading literary texts as a uniquely consciousness-raising activity and stresses the centrality of consciousness in all investigations of meaning. The study of phenomenology and the work of Husserl, Ingarden, Gadamer, and Poulet have influenced and contributed to the Iser's work.

Lecture 1

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Professor Jay M. Winter

Charles J. Stille Professor of History, Yale University

Title: The moral witness and the two world wars

Date: Tuesday, 1 November 2005

Jay M. Winter is a specialist on World War I and its impact on the 20th century. His other interests include remembrances of war in the 20th century, such as memorial and mourning sites, European population decline, the causes and institution of war, British popular culture in the World War I era and the Armenian genocide of 1915. Winter is the author or co-author of a dozen books, including Socialism and the Challenge of War, Ideas and Politics in Britain, 1912-18, The Great War and the British People, The Fear of Population Decline, The Experience of World War I, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History, 1914-1918: The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century and his most recent, The Generation of Memory. He has edited or co-edited 13 books and contributed more than 40 book chapters to edited volumes. Works in preparation include the second volume of "Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914-1919. The Cultural History of Nostalgic Modernity" and "Visions and Violence: An Alternative History of the 20th Century." He has also written a number of book introductions, forewords and translations. The historian was co-producer, co-writer and chief historian for the PBS series "The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century," which won an Emmy Award in 1997. Winter earned BA from Columbia University and his PhD and DLitt from Cambridge University. He taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Warwick and the University of Cambridge before joining the faculty of Columbia University in 2000 and then the Yale faculty one year later. At Yale, his courses include seminars on modern British and comparative modern European history. Winter has presented named lectures at Dartmouth College, Union University, Indiana University and the Leo Baeck Institute in New York. He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.